The only real benefits of a hard drive over SSD today are the higher storage capacity and the fact that the average hard drive is cheaper than comparable SSDs. As storage capacities increase HDDs, become more appealing to many users.

Western Digital (WD) has announced a pair of new hard drives today called the WD Scorpio Blue in 750GB and 1TB capacities. Both of the drives use the same platters cramming 333GB of storage space each. The drives both have the same 12.5mm form factor meaning that they won’t fit into machines that have 9.5mm drive bays.

WD will also be putting the Scorpio Blue hard drives into external storage solutions like the My Passport Essential SE USB drives along with select notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs. The drives are optimized for cool and quiet operation. The interface used by the drives is the 3Gb/s interface.

"The convergence of the growing mobile computing and digital media trends produces demand for desktop-like capacities in portable devices," said Jim Morris, senior vice president and general manager of client systems at WD. "Our new WD Scorpio Blue drives enable people to take even more of their digital collections with them wherever they go and, realizing the value of their data, back up their notebooks on their My Passport drives."

Features of the Scorpio Blue drives include WhisperDrive making it one of the most silent 2.5-inch hard drives available. ShockGuard combines firmware and hardware features to help the drive reach the highest combined shock tolerance specifications for notebooks. The drives also feature SecurePark that parks the head off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. The feature ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface.

The Scorpio Blue 750GB HDD is available now at $189.99, the 1TB drive is only available now in the My Passport Essential SE USB drive for $249.99.

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It is more likely that after making platters they are inspected. If there are any defects that would prevent it from running well at 333gb it is dropped down to 84gb and put into a HDD with two other perfectly fine 333gb platters. Or maybe two 208gb platters and a single 333gb. Either way it gives them a way to cut down on production losses due to inevitable bad appled in the batch.

This is nothing bad about them either, its standard practice in manufacturing. If a 3ghz cpu runs too hot at 3ghz they just down rate it and sell it as a 2.6 or 2.8ghz, same with ram and video card gpu/vram.